AMD FirePro™ professional graphics is fully optimized, thoroughly tested and officially certified for use with Mari, Nuke , and Modo from The Foundry giving you the power and reliability you need to paint a brighter future.

CERTIFIED PERFORMANCE

AMD FirePro™ professional graphics cards are now tested and certified by The Foundry and AMD, giving you optimized performance and reliability when using MARI, NUKE² and MODO. The latest generation AMD FirePro™ cards feature the new Graphics Core Next (GCN) GPU architecture from AMD which delivers new levels of graphics and compute performance from a single card, making AMD FirePro™ your ideal choice to meet the needs of modern VFX production, enabling artists to work with textures up to 32K in resolution, on models comprising many millions of polygons.

SHAPING THE FUTURE OF GRAPHICS TOGETHER

A demanding task requires a powerful tool – and in the case of texture painting, that tool is MARI. Originally developed for work on Avatar, the 3D paint package is designed to meet the needs of modern VFX production, enabling artists to work with textures up to 32K in resolution, on models comprising many millions of polygons.

To do this, MARI makes extensive use of the GPU, using shaders to provide a real-time 3D preview of the model complete with simulated displacement, ambient occlusion and specular highlights. So when The Foundry set out to optimise the application for AMD’s graphics hardware, the two companies were initiating an intense collaboration: one that would last a full year.

The results became public in December 2012 with the release of MARI 1.6, which numbers AMD’s FirePro™ W7000, W8000 and W9000 among its supported GPUs – and the work is still going on. Future releases of MARI are expected to support AMD’s new professional cards as well.

MORE PERFORMANCE WITH AMD GCN GPU ARCHITECTURE AND OPEN STANDARDS

A key advantage of The Foundry’s software is its extensive use of shaders: programs that run on the GPU via its built-in rendering pipeline.

In MARI, The Foundry’s tessellation shader simulates displacement, reducing the geometry count of a scene on the fly. The software also makes use of pixel shaders to apply ambient occlusion and advanced lighting effects.

MARI’s use of shader code means that the graphics card is critical to a responsive user experience. With a fast GPU, a user can change objects and lighting more quickly: a performance boost that becomes more noticeable as a scene gets bigger.

AMD’s support for open standards over proprietary technologies meant that The Foundry had to be rigorous with its code. “We use pretty much every trick in the book to get as much speed out of MARI as possible, so we use OpenGL in some inventive ways,” says MARI Product Manager Jack Greasley. “The AMD drivers conform strictly to the OpenGL standard and we worked hard to ensure our shader code did too.”

DESIGNED TO MEET THE NEEDS OF REAL PRODUCTIONS

The new AMD Radeon™ HD 7850 and HD 7950 consumer cards also feature the GCN architecture, and are certified for use with MARI. But while the AMD Radeon™ cards have only 2GB and 3GB of on-board memory, the professional AMD FirePro™ W-series cards benefit from a frame buffer twice that size: 4GB in the case of the AMD FirePro™ W7000 and W8000, 6GB for the W9000.

MARI has a lot of very heavy shader code that only mid-to-high-end cards can run correctly, but sometimes you also need a lot of memory to load all of the assets at the same time. Otherwise, a lot of time is wasted loading data to the GPU and unloading it back to the CPU. In general, the user experience will be more fluid on a high-end card, particularly with heavy projection work or using dense shaders.

RECOMMENDED FOR THE FOUNDRY

AMD FIREPRO™ W7100

AMD FIREPRO™ W8100

AMD FIREPRO™ W9100

GPU Memory

8GB GDDR5

8GB GDDR5

16GB GDDR5

AMD GCN Stream Processors

1792

2560

2816

Compute Performance (Single Precision)

3.3 TFLOPS

4.2 TFLOPS

5.24 TFLOPS

Geometry Boost

Yes

Yes

Yes

Memory Bandwidth

160 GB/s

320 GB/s

320 GB/s

Physical Display Outputs

Four DisplayPort 1.2a

Four DisplayPort 1.2

Four DisplayPort 1.2

Total Display Outputs with AMD Eyefinity™and DisplayPort 1.2a1

6

6

6

Genlock/Framelock

Yes/Yes

Yes/Yes

Yes/Yes

Ready for 4K (UHD)

Yes

Yes

Yes

System Interface

PCIe 3.0, Single-Slot

PCIe 3.0, Dual-Slot

PCIe 3.0, Dual-Slot

OpenGL

4.4

4.4

4.4

Solutions Overview

Find out why AMD FirePro™graphics are used by many M&Eprofessionals.

The OpenCL™ Revolution

See how AMD and OpenCL™ areenabling M&E software to tapinto the processing power ofmodern GPUs.

AMD Eyefinity™ technology supports up to six DisplayPort monitors on an enabled graphics card. Supported display quantity, type and resolution vary by model and board design. Mixed monitors of different resolutions are supported by select AMD FirePro™ professional graphics cards. Confirm specifications with manufacturer before purchase. To enable more than two displays, or multiple displays from a single output, additional hardware such as DisplayPort™-ready monitors or DisplayPort 1.2 MST-enabled hubs may be required. A maximum of two active adapters is recommended for consumer systems. See www.amd.com/eyefinityfaq for full details.

1

Certified in that it uses OpenGL 2.0 but does not support Cuda GPU acceleration